When two years of academic work vanished with a single click
Nature
(...) in August, I temporarily disabled the ‘data consent’ option because I wanted to see whether I would still have access to all of the model’s functions if I did not provide OpenAI with my data. At that moment, all of my chats were permanently deleted and the project folders were emptied — two years of carefully structured academic work disappeared. No warning appeared. There was no undo option. Just a blank page. Fortunately, I had saved partial copies of some conversations and materials, but large parts of my work were lost forever.
At first, I thought it was a mistake. I tried different browsers, devices and networks. I cleared the cache, reinstalled the app and even changed the settings back and forth. Nothing helped.
When I contacted OpenAI’s support, the first responses came from an AI agent. Only after repeated enquiries did a human employee respond, but the answer remained the same: the data were permanently lost and could not be recovered.
